Eph was not in the mood for a guessing game. Besides, at the mention of real food, his mouth had begun to water, his belly twisting into a fist. “Where?”
“In a cooler, stashed nearby. You can help me carry it.”
“Carry it where?”
“Uptown,” said Fet. “We need to go get Gus.”
Staatsburg, New York
NORA RODE IN the backseat of a town car, speeding through rainy rural New York. The upholstery was dark and clean, but the floor mats were filthy from foot mud. Nora sat all the way over on the right, curled up in the corner, not knowing what was to come next.
She did not know where she was being taken. After her shocking encounter with her former boss Everett Barnes, Nora was led by two hulking vampires to a building with a room full of curtainless showers. The vampires remained near the only door, standing together. She could have made a stand there and refused but felt it was best to go along and see what was to come, perhaps a better chance to escape.
So she disrobed and showered. Self-consciously at first, but when she looked back at the big vampires, their eyes were focused on the far wall with their trademark distant stare, lacking any interest in the human form.
The cool spray—she could not get it hot—felt alien against her bare scalp. Her skin was prickled by needles of cold water, and the runoff spilled unimpeded down the back of her neck and naked back. The water felt good. Nora grabbed a half bar of soap sitting in a recessed tile niche. She lathered her hands and head and bare stomach and found relief in the ritual. She washed her shoulders and neck, pausing to smell the soap right against her nose—rose and lilac—a relic from the past. Someone, somewhere had made this bar of soap. Along with thousands of others, and packaged and shipped it in a normal day with traffic jams and school drops and hurried lunches. Someone had thought the bar of soap with rose and lilac scent would sell well and designed it—its shape and scent and color—to attract the attention of housewives and mothers on the crowded shelves of a Kmart or a Walmart. And now that bar of soap was here—in a processing plant. An archaeological artifact that smelled of roses and lilacs and of times gone by.
A new gray jumper was folded on a bench in the middle of the room, with a pair of white cotton panties set on top. She dressed and was led back through the quarantine station to the front gates. Above her, on an arch of rusting iron, dripped the word LIBERTY. The town car arrived, as did another one behind it. Nora got in the back of the first car; no one entered the second car.
A glasslike partition of hard plastic separated the driver from her passenger. She was a human in her early twenties, dressed in a man’s chauffeur suit and cap. Her hair was shaved tight below the back of her cap brim, leading Nora to assume that she was bald, and therefore perhaps a camp resident herself. And yet the pinkness of her flesh on the back of her neck and the healthy color of her hands made Nora doubt that she was a regular bleeder.
Nora turned again, obsessing over the tail car as she had done since pulling away from the camp. She couldn’t be sure, through the glare of its headlights in the dark rain, but something about the driver’s posture made her think it was a vamp. A backup car, maybe, in case she tried to escape. Her own doors were completely stripped of their inside panels and armrests, with the lock and window controls removed.
She expected a long ride, but little more than two or three miles away from the camp the town car pulled off the road through an open driveway gate. Rising out of the foggy gloom at the end of a long, curling driveway was a house larger and grander than most any she had ever seen. It appeared out of the New York countryside like a European manor, with nearly every window lit warmly yellow, as though for a party.
The car stopped. The driver remained behind the wheel as a butler exited the door, holding two umbrellas, one open over his head. He pulled Nora’s door open and shielded her from the dirty rain as she exited the vehicle and walked with him up slick marble steps. Inside, he disposed of the umbrellas and snapped a white towel off a nearby rack, dropping to one knee to attend to her muddied feet.
“This way, Dr. Martinez,” he said. Nora followed him, her bare soles silent upon the cool floor down a wide hallway. Brightly lit rooms, floor vents pushing warm air, the pleasing odor of cleaning solution. It was all so civilized, so human. Which is to say, so dreamlike. The difference between the blood camp and this mansion was the difference between ash and satin.
The butler pulled open twin doors, revealing an opulent dining room featuring a long table with only two settings laid out, adjoining one corner. The dishes were gold-rimmed with fluted edges, a small coat of arms in the center. The glassware was crystal, but the silverware was stainless steel—not silver. It was apparently the only concession in the entire mansion to the reality of the vampire-run world.
Arranged on a brass platter kitty-corner between the twin settings were a bowl of gorgeous plums, a porcelain basket of assorted pastries, and two dishes of chocolate truffles and other confectionery treats. The plums called to her. She reached for the bowl before stopping herself, remembering the drugged water they had given her in the camp. She needed to resist temptation and, despite her hunger, make smart choices.
She did not sit, remaining standing on bare feet. Music played faintly elsewhere inside the house. There was a second door across the room, and she considered trying the knob. But she felt watched. She looked for cameras and saw none.
The second door opened. Barnes entered, again wearing his formal, all-white admiral’s uniform. His skin beamed healthy and pink around his trim white Vandyke beard. Nora had almost forgotten how healthy a well-nourished human being could look.
“Well,” he said, striding down the length of the table toward her. He kept one hand tucked in his pocket, aping a gentleman of the manor. “This is a much more amenable setting to reacquaint ourselves, isn’t it? Camp life is so dreary. This place is my great escape.” He swirled his hand at the room and the house beyond. “Too big for only me, of course. But with eminent domain, everything on the menu is priced the same, so why settle for less than the very best? It was once owned by a pornographer, I understand. Smut bought all this. So I don’t feel all that bad.” He smiled, the corners of his mouth pulling up the trimmed edges of his pointy beard, as he reached her end of the table. “You haven’t eaten?” he said, looking at the food tray. He reached for a pastry drizzled with a sugary glaze. “I imagined you’d be famished.” He looked at the pastry with pride. “I have these made for me. Every day in a bakery in Queens, just for me. I used to long for them as a kid—but I couldn’t afford them … But now …”
Barnes took a bite of the pastry. He sat down at the head of the table and unfolded his napkin, smoothing it out on his knee.
Nora, once she knew the food was untainted, grabbed a plum and made quick work of it, devouring the fruit. She grabbed her own napkin to swipe at her juice-slicked chin, then reached for another.
“You bastard,” she said with her mouth full.
Barnes smiled flatly, expecting better from her. “Wow, Nora—straight to the point … ‘Realist’ is more like it. You want ‘opportunist’? That I might accept. Maybe. But this is a new world now. Those who accept this fact and acclimate themselves to it are much better off.”
“How noble. A sympathizer with these … these monsters.”
“On the contrary, I would say that sympathy is one trait that I lack.”
“A profiteer, then.”
He considered that, playing at polite conversation, finishing off his pastry and licking each of his fingertips. “Maybe.”
“How about ‘traitor’? Or—‘motherfucker’?”